It opens with Bobby Vinton's 1964 hit song Mister
Lonely
playing
in the background while an American living alone in
Paris is
impersonating
Michael Jackson (Diego Luna, Mexican actor) and is
decked out in a
surgical
mask and wearing high-water black pants while
aimlessly riding a
mini-bike
with a puppet-like object on his shoulder. So begins
the latest Harmony
Korine ("Gummo"/"Julien Donkey-Boy") weirdo pic,
cowritten with his
brother
Avi. It's an aimless pic that proposes to shun a
straight
narrative
in order to say something audacious and show something
touchingly
dreamlike
about those who chose to live their lives vicariously
through
impersonating
celebrities, with only the Abraham Lincoln character
not plucked from
the
pop culture world. Korine, the aging enfant terrible,
after being away
from the business for nine years must have felt lonely
not being the
agitator
and returns to filmmaking in his third film with a
sweeter and more
visually
playful pic than his others (though not necessarily a
more engaging
one).

The sugary sweet innocent Michael Jackson character
(no
adventures
with little boys here) tries to survive in Paris as a
street performer
and his kind-hearted theatrical agent (or perhaps his
psychiatrist),
Renard
(Leos Carax, French director), gets him bookings
occasionally and
arranges
for Michael to make a repeat visit to a nursing home.
There Michael
meets
Marilyn Monroe imitator (Samantha Morton), also from
the States, who is
impressed with his dancing. They afterwards sip red
wine at a sidewalk
cafe and she tells Michael she met on a cruise ship
and later married
Charlie
Chaplin imitator (Denis Levant) and have a
seven-year-old daughter who
is a Shirley Temple (Esme Creed-Miles) imitator.
Marilyn invites
Michael
to stay with them and other like-minded impersonators
who live in a
commune
in the Scottish Highlands and look after sheep, where
all have similar
stories of trying to live without shame and become
somebody different
and
somebody "better" than their actual selves. Michael
accepts the offer
and
upon arrival at the fairy-tale castle residence
(Duncraig Castle at
Plockton
in Scotland) meets the other ersatz characters that
includes: The Pope
(James Fox), Madonna (Melita Morgan), Queen Elizabeth
(Anita
Pallenberg,
former heroin addict casualty from the sixties), Sammy
Davis Jr. (Jason
Pennycooke), the foul-mouthed Abraham Lincoln (Richard
Strange), Little
Red Riding Hood (Rachel Korine), James Dean (Joseph
Morgan), Buckwheat
(Michael-Joel Stuart) and the Three Stooges (Daniel
Rovai, Mal
Whiteley,
Nigel Cooper). In this utopian community the imitator
performers strive
to put on a gala show for themselves and for the
community. But there's
a fly in the ointment in paradise, as the imitators
follow the same
path
as their counterparts and their fate thereby tracks
along the same life
experiences of their real counterparts where tragedy,
jealousy and,
uniquely
for them, they must also face a livestock disease.

If this daffy tale wasn't enough to keep you
occupied
questioning
your sanity in seeing such a pic, there's a parallel
and even more
daffy
story taking place that's set in the jungles of
Central America. Here a
nun (Britta Gartner) while dropping bags of rice over
poor villages
accidentally
falls out of a plane that's piloted by the
social-activist priest
(Werner
Herzog, German director). The nun, without a
parachute, says a prayer
on
the way down and survives by flying in the air; with
this miracle under
her blue habit, she then tries to convince her fellow
sisters that they
too should jump out of the plane without a parachute
to test their
faith
in God. Thereby, supposedly, the Catholic Church can
have a bunch of
flying
nuns to boast about along with all its other miracles
it has gathered
over
the years. I have no clue what all this means or what
the usually shock
happy Korine is driving at and, for that matter, how
it relates to
those
celebrity imitators in the Scottish Highland (except
in some stretch of
the imagination you can say that both the nuns and the
mimics live in
communes
and are both searching or trying to convince
themselves they have found
a purpose in the world; but that's still a big reach
comparing the
wacky
worldly Jackson to the faith-based nuns). What I do
know is that though
the film had a quirky quality, a few impressive
visuals and tried to be
as loving as Todd Browning's Freaks (1932) was to its
subjects, I
nevertheless
couldn't warm up to its special charms as everything
attempted seemed
like
an incoherent mess, was unmoving, pretentious and,
worst of all, was a
bore.